From Page to Screen (Part Two)

I'm back on the business of adapting films from books.  Last time (for now).  I promise.  Anyway, it's one thing to adapt a well-known novel into a film, quite another when it is what is essentially a piece of pulp fiction being adapted into a movie.  On the one hand, the source is unlikely to have as many die hard fans as a piece of 'legitimate' literature, allowing more leeway in the process of adaptation, on the other, pulpy novels are more likely to be 'cinematic' in the first place, making the process of adaptation more straightforward.  There is, not surprisingly, a specific case study I have in mind when it comes to this sort of thing: a 1974 Vincent Price movie called Madhouse.  This film was based on a novel titled Devilday by Angus Hall, published in the late sixties.  The book was one of those mass market genre paperbacks that publishers like NEL, Badger and Sphere used to turn out by the dozen.  Generally running only around 30-40,000 words, they were usual quick, undemanding reads, often parts of series written under house names by a variety of authors.  Devilday, however, was a standalone and Angus Hall wasn't a pseudonym.  I know little of the author, other than the fact that in the late sixties and early seventies he turned out several paperbacks in a variety of genres.  Another novel, Deathday (not linked to Devilday, despite the title), was adapted by the BBC as part of the last series of Out of the Unknown.  An adaptation Hall so disliked that, for many years, he could be found on any message board discussing Out of the Unknown denouncing both the series and the BBC in general.

What he thought of Madhouse, though, I have no idea.  After his reaction to the other adaptation, I would have expected him to be even more vociferous about this one.  But then again, Madhouse doesn't get much discussed anywhere.  And maybe Amicus and AIP paid him more for the film rights to Devilday than the BBC had for Deathday.  To say that the film strays somewhat radically from the source novel is putting it mildly.  That said, you can, however, still recognise Madhouse as an adaptation of Devilday, albeit a loose one. You can see why the film makers were attracted to the novel as the basis for a Vincent Price vehicle - its central character is a washed up American star of a series of macabre movies who comes to the UK after a sex and murder scandal in the US, to make a TV series based on the films.  Naturally, all kinds of mayhem, including sex fueled occult rituals and murders follow him.  One of the pleasures of the book to those of us who grew up in the South of England is that the local ITV franchise the main character is contracted by to make the TV series - the fictional South Coast TV - is clearly inspired by the real local franchise, Southern TV.  Indeed, the novel paints a vivid picture of the rickety nature of the early days of the smaller ITV franchises and the vicious internal politics and back-biting as the 'talent' tried to climb the greasy pole of broadcasting.

Unfortunately, the film abandons all of this.  The most radical change being the complete elimination of the book's first person narrator, an over ambitious and not particularly likeable junior reporter charged with keeping the main character, Paul Toombes (in both book and film), out of trouble, something he resents, seeing it as a distraction from his attempts to use South Coast TV as a stepping stone to Thames TV and the bright lights of London.  His cynical narration of the story as it unfolds is one of the novel's most distinctive features and our entire view of Toombes is from his jaded perspective, raising the possibility, early on, that the actor might not, in reality, be the monster we're lead to believe that he is.  The portrayal of Toombes is another major point of divergence between book and novel: the literary Toombes is overweight, short tempered, with clear drug and alcohol problems and often speaks and behaves like a cheap hoodlum, yet still mysteriously attractive to women.  By contrast, the movie Toombes, as played by Vincent Price, is a far sleeker, more refined character, well spoken and sophisticated, despite the fact that his career is on the decline.  These changes are understandable - the film is, after all, a vehicle for Vincent Price, meaning that the lead character had to be reshaped to accommodate his screen image and talents.  Likewise, the book's narrative structure would have inserted a second lead character into the action, a narrator who, arguably, is rendered superfluous any way by the nature of film as a visual medium - it doesn't need descriptions of situations and characters when it can show them.

But the film adaptation makes even more radical changes, altering the whole nature of the plot.  Whereas the book firmly concentrates on the narrator's attempts to prove Toombes' involvement in a series of macabre events which unfold in tandem with the growing popularity of his TV series, the film instead focuses on attempts by parties unknown to drive Toombes mad (he suffered a mental breakdown before coming to the UK), by framing him for various murders which are being committed by someone dressed like his character, 'Dr Death' (Madhouse was actually filmed under the title The Revenge of Dr Death, although the character in the book is called 'Dr Dis').  Which, obviously, changes the central character from enigmatic probable villain to more sympathetic probable victim.  Again, this doubtless had to do with the casting of Price and a decision to try and vary his character from the more obviously sinister and villainous characters. like Dr Phibes, he had recently been portraying. To accommodate these plot changes, the film elevates a minor character from the book, Toombes' scriptwriter Herbert Flay, played by Peter Cushing to status of main villain, as he is revealed to be the driving force behind the plot against Toombes, jealous that Toombes has received all the credit for 'Dr Death', a character that Flay created.  Consequently, in order to destroy Toombes, Flay 'becomes' him in the guise of 'Dr Death'.

What all of these alterations succeed in doing, however, is to transform a fascinating and surprisingly well written and slightly unusual horror pot-boiler into a fairly ordinary Vincent Price vehicle.  The most significant casualty of the transformation is the book's central conceit that Toombes believes that he is the reincarnation of an ancient mystic and that he he has had many lives over the centuries and will have many more in the future.  This belief he uses as justification for all of his actions, contending that nothing he does in this life matters, as he is already 'chosen' and will have many more existences which, overall, form part of a greater scheme.  A complex idea - too complex, perhaps, for a seventies B horror movie.  So, instead, it is ditched in favour of a conventional revenge plot.  Not that Madhouse doesn't create some memorable ideas of its own: at the climax Toombes, having apparently already died, literally steps out of a cinema screen to confront Flay and the movie's end Toombes returns Flay's compliments by 'becoming' him after killing the writer, applying make up until he looks like Cushing.  In the end, though, despite some decent visuals and enjoyable performances, Madhouse descends into a welter of confusing chases, killings and identity swaps.  To be fair, the fault lies less with the script than it does with the interference of producer Milton Subotsky.  According to director Jim Clarke (better known as an editor), Subotsky 'bulldozed his way into the editing room' and cut several major sequences, claiming that were either too talky or simply that they bored him.  The result was a film which becomes incoherent in its second half.  Whether the movie as filmed by Clarke would have been any better is something we'll never know, but one can't help but feel that a greater fidelity to its source might have resulted in a more distinctive and interesting film.